Gray recounts desperate battle at sea

"After the battle off Leyte, I counted 270 holes punched through the side of our ship," grinned an 80-year-old Alford Lee Gray of Olathe, as he shook his head in disbelief. "Some of the shells had gone completely through the Kitkun Bay. I don't know why we were still floating after that fight."

Alford Gray, like many young Coloradans enlisting in World War II, had grown up Depression tough.

"We went hungry a lot, but we weren't starving," Gray said. "We did what we had to do to survive. Times were hard, but I think it made us better people really. Nothing was handed to you. Everyone carried his own water, and if you could, you helped those who were having trouble. The Depression, in a lot of ways, brought people closer together. You relied on your neighbor and he relied on you. Without knowing it, I think we took that feeling into the war with us."

The Great Depression of the '30s also steeled many of our nation's youth for the hardships of war. They were tempered. Long, grueling days laboring under a relentless summer sun were common. In the winter, the stark cold nipped bitterly at the exposed flesh. The days weren't measured so much by hours as much as they were by what had to be done, what was still to be done and what had been accomplished. When a whistle finally blew at the end of a work day, you went to your second job. Backs grew strong. Fortitude and one's mettle were personal badges of courage, and nearly everyone wore callouses, even your best girl.

It was a big, strong, calloused hand Gray offered me as we met to talk about the intrepid U.S.S. Kitkun Bay, an escort carrier that had slugged its way across the chancy seas of the Pacific from Saipan to Manila Bay. She was a Casablanca class carrier manufactured by the Kaiser Shipbuilding Co. out of Vancouver, Wash., and named after an Alaskan Bay on the southeast coast of Prince of Wales Island. The mighty Navy "jeep" was armed with one 5-inch GP gun, eight twin 40-mm anti-aircraft guns and 20 20-mm anti-aircraft guns.

The Kitkun Bay was designed to support the Pacific Island invasions. Though she had the ability to defend, the slow cargo carrier was not a battleship. The tough little carrier, however, through the reckless winds of war, found her finest hour in a harrowing duel with the powerful Japanese IJN Centre Force. The enemy ships had slipped undetected through the San Bernadino Straits and now were focused on wrenching the island of Leyte back from the Americans.

Japanese Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's armada of formidable warships was hoping to destroy the Kitkun Bay and the other naval ships supplying cover, rations and air support for the five-day-old invasion of Leyte. The heavy gunships of Admiral William F. Halsey's massive Third Fleet had been drawn out of the arena to challenge a Japanese convoy steaming down the east coast of the Philippines. The small group of carriers left to back the Marines on Leyte were all that remained to stop Kurita's massive Imperial fleet from mercilessly bombarding the landed troops.

Vice Admiral Kurita expected a mild resistance from the outgunned American flotilla as his overwhelming naval force launched an early morning attack Oct. 25, 1944. Admiral Kurita was wrong. The resistance was anything but mild. The resolve, the courage and the tenacity of America's sailors became legendary that dangerous morning.

The huge guns roared.

The escort carrier U.S.S. Gambier Bay suffered under the murderous first salvos of Kurita's ambitious 18-inch guns firing from the Musashi. Wounded, the Gambier Bay fell easy prey to the relentless Japanese. Hundreds of 8-inch shells ripped the carrier apart. She eventually, without striking her colors, slipped beneath the sea in a ball of fire.

The Kitkun Bay managed to launch a squadron of Hellcat fighters before she was racked with gunfire. Unable to gain full steam, and having to steer by manual control, the stalwart little carrier entered evasive zigzagging patterns as she returned fire at the approaching armada. Fires broke out where the incendiary bombs smashed on the decks.

"Then came the Zeros," Gray said, his eyes opening wider as he revisited those horrifying moments. "There were hundreds of them."

The anti-aircraft batteries whipped wildly from port to starboard as they frantically sprayed the skies in their desperate attempts to stop the lethal Japanese Zeros that struck like lightning out of the clouds. Still, more fires exploded.

"Things weren't looking real good," Gray said, trying to smile. "But we were luckier than some of the others."

The others were the carriers U.S.S. St. Lo and the U.S.S. Princeton, which were damaged so severely they were scuttled and sent to the bottom. Two destroyers, the U.S.S. Hoel and the U.S.S. Johnston, along with a destroyer escort, the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, were also lost in the clash of the sea titans. However, after two and a half hours the desperate shootout suddenly came to a close with the Japanese Imperial Navy retreating.

Vice Admiral Kurita's adventure with America's "mild resistance" cost him 10 cruisers, four carriers, three battleships and nine destroyers. The pivotal battle off Leyte was a humiliating defeat for the Japanese from which they would never recover. Skirmishes and losses were not over; however, the heart had been taken out of Japan's glorious Imperial Fleet.

The U.S.S. Kitkun Bay, along with helmsman Alford Gray, eventually sailed into Manila Bay to aid in the liberation of Luzon. It was in the same waters that in 1898, Commodore George Dewey gave the command, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," that had launched America into being a world naval power when we defeated Spain's armada. It was also in these same waters that the U.S.S. Kitkun Bay would see her last action.

"A Kamikaze came out of nowhere and exploded on deck," Gray said. "The damage was so bad and the fires were so intense, we were given permission to abandon ship. But the captain said 'no.' We put the fires out and somehow got the ship back to Pearl Harbor."

Alford Gray returned to raising cattle on the high Uncompahgre Plateau after the war. He brought home a Good Conduct Medal, an Asiatic Pacific Ribbon with five stars, a World War II Victory Medal, a Philippine Liberation Medal and a Presidential Citation for his valor in the heroic sea battle off Leyte. Gray still cowboys occasionally for his older brother Nick Gray, a Pearl Harbor survivor.

The gallant U.S.S. Kitkun Bay was decommissioned April 19, 1946, and subsequently sold for scrap.